Sessions for our past 2017 Event

Below are crowdsourced hot topics that will be held in form of discussion based sessions. The moderators are very experienced in their topics and are volunteers from our DocVille community. There will be different sessions running at the same time and depending on the demand, we may even decide to run certain topics more than once. We have booked a room which can be split in to three separate areas. Attendees are of course free to choose which sessions they prefer to attend during the event. The purpose of these sessions is to meet peers and to share and discuss your opinion, vision and insights around these topics and learn from each other, validating ideas and strategies. Please scroll down the page to see all the sessions:

A) Business Impact of GDPR Compliance on the IM-Industry- Get Ready!

On May 25, 2018, the EU will begin to enforce the new European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). GDPR focuses on the data privacy rights of EU citizens: it gives them back the control of their data, but it also regulates and simplifies aspects of personal data handled outside the EU, while at the same time strictly imposing fines for breach of data privacy laws. Is the timing a coincidence? Both Forrester and AIIM identified compliance as the top driver (increasing from 38% to 59% in 2016) for ECM content services, and we are now seeing the first business models around data privacy appear. While the new privacy data regulation might be in a collision course with the business models of companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon & Co. GDPR may offer excellent business opportunities to our industry. In this roundtable we would like to discuss the following aspects and questions:

Which IM vendors can greatly benefit from this new EU regulation and who will be left behind?

What does the new GDPR regulation implicate for any type of Cloud offering?

Are there also implications for B2B offerings, e.g. Digital HR folder in the Cloud?

How do you prepare yourself and your own offering to be in compliance with the new regulation?

What kind of IM / business applications, driven by GDPR or other compliance topics, do you rank high for 2017 and beyond?

What kind of solutions and services can we offer our end customers addressing their GDPR challenges?

Is “Keeping the CEO out of jail” a good enough value proposition, or does it has to resonate with other business goals (make money / save money)?

B) Integrating Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) into ECM – From IDR to NLP and Conversational Chatbots

For over a decade we have been automating document driven processes by means of IDR (Intelligent Document Capture). However between now and 2020, we will see a huge increase of customer and user engagements begin to use Artificial Intelligence to automatically classify, analyse, understand, process and learn insights from incoming docs, emails, social media or mobile and then also to create new outbound content. AI technologies such as NLP (Natural Language Processing), predictive analytics and Intelligent Customer Assistants (known as „Conversational Chatbots“) will become the norm with customer solutions. For most IM vendors, it will be too complex to develop their own AI algorithms: however they can quickly integrate and deploy AI tools available as a Service. In this roundtable we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

Which AIaaS services will be the most commonly used in our IM industry?

What are the most compelling commercial use case scenarios?

How complex or easy is it to implement various AIaaS technologies such as IDR, NLP or Conversational Chatbots into ECM solutions?

How precise are these technologies today and what is the potential of deep learning algorithms?

What are the most common pricing models and how channel friendly are they?

C) Blockchain and the Impact on Information & Transaction Management

Over the last year, the Blockchain has become one of the hottest technologies. Venture capitalists are actively investing in Blockchain startups, as well as most global banks and financial institutions. And it will have an impact across a lot more than just Bitcoin financial transactions and the Internet Of Things. Currently, much of thinking behind Blockchain is focused on its properties enabling decentralisation for distributed digital records - think “a single source of truth” - where a digital record is updated or approved by consensus of a majority of the participants in the blockchain system. As much of our digital information and records are currently centralised, they are at risk of being manipulated and hacked. Not so with Blockchain. Users remain anonymous, privacy is maintained. Putting e.g.health records, voting, ownership documents, marriage licenses and lawsuits in the Blockchain, every dataset and every digital transaction could leave a “fingerprint” there, creating an audit trail for any digital event throughout history, without compromising anyone’s personal privacy. In this roundtable we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

What is Blockchain, why is everyone so interested in it and how can organizations monetize it?

Authenticity of records, content and transactions, and its decentralised nature are the strength behind Blockchain technology . Which use cases do you foresee such as for proof of ownership, authorship, transaction history of digital purchases and content?

Why can it disrupt ECM and centralised or cloud based storage services?

What are your first lessons learned when building business solutions powered by the Blockchain?

Are there any good SDKs or is it advisable to use Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS)?

Can it be a good backbone for machine learning and true artificial intelligence?

D) Leveraging Crowdsourcing to Complement Capture for BPO and Shared Services Operations – What is the Promise?

Although automated data capture solutions have been used to extract information from document images to reduce the cost of manual data entry for over 20 years, the reality is that it might still be more cost-efficient when people (either offshore or nearshore) process key entry. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of the cloud giving rise to a crowdsourcing movement, which introduces almost unlimited resources to the key entry mix. By combining it with today’s automated recognition technology, it can potentially create extremely accurate and cost effective data capture services for its customers and become an alternative solution to off- or nearshoring sites. Being a relatively new and maybe still controversial concept, we would like to discuss the following topics at this roundtable:

Which are suitable industries and scenarios where crowdsourced data capture makes sense and where it doesn’t?

What type of objections would you have against Crowdsourcing? What kind of benefits would you expect from such a solution?

How quick or complex is it to implement such a project? How do such crowed-sourced services connect with the customer’s IT infrastructure?

What are the most common pricing models as well as financial and efficiency gains?

Can data privacy, safety and quality compliance be met? What type of SLAs would you expect in terms of availability and scalability?

How can the data entry personnel be trained for reliability?

Would you see ethical implications (i.e. below minimum standard wages) for this?

What other kind of applications could you imagine related to typical applications in the IM industry?

Our industry is disrupted by technologies in cloud, analytics, mobile, social and IoT. New niche players as well as large platform vendors are entering the space of IM that all have content management and customer experience management elements in their solutions. There is a rapidly growing demand from end user organisations for solutions vendors that can accompany them on their entire digital transformation journey. This also puts a lot of pressure on IM solution vendors that need to bring out new solutions that incorporate such technologies with a very short time to market. Solution suppliers need to transform themselves from a technology, skills and business led model to being able to address these new requirements, supporting their customers on their digital transformation journey, helping them to compete in the 21st century. In this roundtable we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

Which are the key requirements and their main implications for IM solutions providers offering DT solutions?

To address the DT requirements of your customers, have you transformed your own organisation from a technology, skills and business model point of view?

What types of potential technologies, collaboration and partnerships do you consider necessary to overcome the DT solutions gap and in which areas?

Do you see new competition arising from new DT niche players or traditional players from other IT areas (e.g. analytics) that are increasingly addressing the DT issues of your clients?

What do you consider to be the biggest challenge in offering DT solutions, compared to your competition?

How do you support your clients with their DT strategy? Do you offer change management to address the human side for getting the DT right?

Which areas of your business do you consider the most important one that need to be transformed: technology & solutions, service offering, pricing & business models, skill & resources, relationship & partnerships models, internal culture, sales & marketing, trust, security & compliance, funding & fostering…?

How do you redesign IM-solutions to help your client organisations offer better customer service, gather customer feedback, measure customer sentiments and communicate with them online?

The IM market is becoming increasingly fragmented and also disrupted by newcomers from outside of the ECM industry that all have content management elements in their new emerging solutions without calling it ECM. Likewise C-Level executives today look to invest in technologies like business intelligence, customer experience and transaction management with modular capabilities and which can be consumed as services. According to Gartner the term “ECM” no longer reflects market dynamics or the organizational needs for content in digital business. It has been replaced by the term Content Services, a strategic concept that covers three aspects: Content Services Applications, Platforms and Components. The opportunity today is that this alternative strategic approach provides organizations with a more practical way to achieve the benefits of the original vision of ECM. This has led to heavy debates amongst ECM and IM vendors about the necessity and confusion of what has been their home term and breadwinner for the last 20+ years. In this round-table you are invited to join the debate and share your view by discussing the following points:

What are the new definitions and components of Content Services Platforms and Applications versus ECM and EIM (Enterprise Information Management)?

Do we really need new to retire long established terminology of ECM or EIM, or will it be confusing for the enduser organisations? Or is it old wine in new bottles for selling more analyst reports?

Can we give ECM a larger definition to reflect a new scope business and architecture without changing its name?

What does it mean for applications leaders in charge of content management projects, casting aside previous notions or rethinking their business strategy and technology approaches?

What are the implications for existing vendors from a sales, marketing and delivery point of view in the upcoming years?

G) How AI is Driving the New Wave of Digitization in the Insurance Industry

The insurance industry—traditionally cautious, heavily regulated, and accustomed to incremental change—is confronting a radical shift. With the rise of digitization and machine learning, insurance activities are becoming automated and the need to attract and retain employees with digital expertise is becoming more critical. According to McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), 45 percent of today’s work can be automated with current technology. Content of documents becomes digitally available by deploying modern classification, extraction and semantic understanding in process automation and digitization. Insurers are using digital data and analytical methods to actually automate not only the process but also the decision making. In this roundtable we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

Where is the potential for digitization?

How will change the workplace and customer service in the next 5 years?

How can advanced analytics and machine learning actually support processes in fraud detection, claims processing and market development?

What is your experience on how the insurance industry is adopting these new technologies?

H) New European Directive eIDAS- New Opportunities in Business and Innovation?

The new EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services 910/2014 – typically referred to as eIDAS - went into force in July 2016. One of its major goals is to fuel E-Signature adoption in Europe by largely replacing 28 nation laws on E-Signatures. It ensures that people and businesses can use their own national electronic identification schemes (eIDs) to access public services in other EU countries where eIDAS are available. Furthermore, it creates a European internal market for eTS - namely electronic signatures, electronic seals, time stamp, electronic delivery service and website authentication - by ensuring that they will work across borders and have the same legal status as traditional paper based processes. In this roundtable we want to share our views and discuss the following points:

Why does eIDAS mean higher security and more convenience for any online activity such as submitting tax declarations, remotely opening a bank account, setting up a business in another Member State, authenticating for internet payments, etc.?

How can industries in banking, insurance, telco and services benefit from eIDAS in particular if they run multi-channel and multi-national operations?

How can eIDAS offer companies and organisations the opportunity to grow their business models when doing business across multiple EU countries?

Can eIDAS bridge the gap and stimulate innovation by providing a predictable regulatory environment that enables secure and seamless electronic interactions between businesses, citizens and public authorities? Or will it rather be just another regulation that hinders innovation?

How can IM vendors help businesses assessing their signing process whether they have already embarked on E-Signing or still stick with wet ink signatures?

How high on the agenda is the eIDAS implementation in your country?

I) The Question of Value: From "Findability" to Content Intelligence and Text Analytics

Search and classification typify the majority of text-oriented solutions and technologies that focus on finding documents from undifferentiated repositories and file systems. The market also supports text extraction technologies often used to automate input into database systems of record.

However, the next generation of Smart (Business) Process Applications (SPAs) contextualize the value of text analytics and focus on how to use content intelligence to accelerate and optimize decision-making. The goal of this roundtable discussion is to have an interactive, 2-way dialogue with participants to investigate:

What business decisions depend on intelligence and analysis from complex business documents? What types of documents are involved?

Where is the business value? How do enterprises want to use text analytics in the context of specific examples?

What text-based technologies and products are involved in these solutions?

How may these new capabilities and insights enhance decision making processes and impact the larger organization?

Are today's enterprises ready for these new capabilities? Are they ready for change?

J) Moving Beyond ROI: Do We Need A New Model For Solution Selling?

Solution selling is at a crossroads: many potential buyers understand the benefits of digitizing their business processes, and many solution sales people can clearly show a return on investment for their client's purchase. However, if there are concrete benefits and a clear ROI, why aren't more customers buying? In fact, "doing nothing" is one of the top three reasons why prospects don't make a purchasing decision.

In this Roundtable, we will explore the following topics:

Are too many of your prospects stuck in the "good enough" stage: ie. not sufficiently motivated to purchase or upgrade to newer, more efficient technology because their cost savings and operational efficiency aren't enough of a reason to make a change?

How can sales teams move beyond selling ROI and operational efficiencies as the primary reasons to purchase and also learn how to best position the underlying business value and bottom line growth potential of digital transformation?

What conversations should sales people be having and with whom in the organisation? And how can marketing support this discussion?

K) Product Portfolio and Brand Strategies for Entry, Exit and Success

As software functionality becomes increasing componentized what are the best practices in product portfolio management, packaging, pricing and branding to maximize value and ease the selling process. In this round-table we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

Managing a portfolio of products effectively - what are the processes that work?

How do leading vendors package suites of product functionality together to make it easy for buyers to assimilate, understand and procure?

Corporate, solution and product level branding strategies that work best - how to plan and implement?

What are the challenges in creating consistent messaging and positioning strategies for complex product portfolios and how to overcome them?

New product introduction - organic and acquisition based - are there really any short cuts?

Integrating acquired technology, functionality and product suites into existing brand architectures and product portfolios - why is it so hard?

As more and more international organisations aim to optimise their document intensive processes like invoice processing (AP) on a multi-country scale by outsourcing to D-BPO partners and/or own Shared Service Centers, they are also facing the challenges of technology, different cultures, legislations and processes. Meanwhile such large projects seem to be very lucrative for BPOs, all too often they faced severe problems because of unclear expectations, poor communication and misaligned interests. However, these pitfalls can be solved when addressing them in a planned diligent manner. In this round-table we will share our experiences and discuss the following points:

Why can multi-country document outsourcing projects be a profitable business for BPOs?

What type of challenges and pitfalls will you be facing?

What is the best way to approach them?

Why can international BPO collaboration be so important?

What have been your best practices from real life experiences?

What are the requirements and the roles of the involved stakeholders (customer, BPO, technology vendor) ?

Which change management needs to happen globally and locally?

M) From Traditional Document Capture to Intelligent Capture Processing and its Value Proposition

The Document Capture industry is changing profoundly from its roots in scanning paper to collecting today's diversity of content. Whilst the proportion of paper is shrinking, we see the variety of multi-channel-input sources and new smart and mobile capture devices driving new growth in volume. Business stakeholders (e.g. customers, suppliers, creditors, employees etc.) are pushing for accelerated processing and thus are creating strong demand for better and faster services. New solutions with multi-content capture and automated information extraction capabilities will be quickly emerging over the next couple of years to become the much needed initiators and accelerators for a broad variety of business processes.

What needs to be considered when building Intelligent Capture solutions that respond to the various trends such as limited IT budgets, mobility, unstructured (big) data, multi-channel engagement, social media, quicker turnaround times, cloud, etc.?

Which capture components are under threat of commoditization and which ones are still badly needed?

How are customer expectations changing with regard to document processing given the trends mentioned above?

Is Intelligent Capture Processing an important building block for the digitization of organizations?

How are increasing compliance and data privacy regulations and rules affecting the paper and & data handling in certain document capture applications?

How do customers organize the physical and electronical handshake in their capture processes?

N) State of IM - Cloud Adoption in 2017 - What is Your Perspective?

For many years, we have read the analyst predictions that Cloud Computing is going to show exponential growth over the coming years. The cloud adoption in Europe is still far behind the USA despite that security, technology and pricing issues don’t seem to be inhibiting factors anymore. In the meantime, many IM vendors have started delivering solutions in the cloud whilst others are considering it. This round table discussion is aimed at IM solution providers who are thinking of entering or have already entered the ‘CLOUD’ market to discuss their observations, concerns and lessons learnt.

Which are the prevailing drivers for cloud adoption in your market and your country?

What is your experience of customers wanting their IM solution in a private versus a public cloud or in a hybrid cloud model. Which considerations are driving these decisions?

Which IM apps show the quickest adoption and which ones don’t- Why?

How is your customer’s IT budget of cloud versus on premise and who is controlling the budget?

Do you see public cloud platforms also as a driver of your own cloud IM apps amongst your customers?

O) Enabling Smart Scan Devices by IoT – New Revenue or Just a Fantasy?

Remember the days when you needed to connect a scanner to an ECM system in order to inject information to it by scanning, OCR and processing documents. By 2020 1.5 trillion people and things will be interconnected by the IoT (Internet of Things) and thus will be the information injected from the convergence of people, processes and technologies. So we also see scan devices becoming smarter whether wearable or stationary provided with intelligent sensors, analytics, virtualization, smart APIs and interfaces offering plenty of new opportunities to users, VARs and Vendors. In this roundtable we will share our vision and discuss:

Should smart scan devices detect or tell in advance when certain parts are going to fail, call the repair service or order a new part by using IoT?

Should embedded analytics provide insight into capture operations, performance, productivity metrics or even suggest improvement for overall system throughput?

Should embedded classification and content understanding reveal metadata about the meaning of captured content and which use cases do you see?

Could VARS and capture vendors benefit from new revenue streams by developing smarter, individualised and customised solutions and services? Which use cases do you envision?

What would be the benefits of a Managed Scanner Service (similar to Managed Print Services) to our joint customers?

Since with IoT the security aspect is increasing, what role of compliance certifications will this involve for the scan device and the capture solution?

P) The Role and Value of Robotic Process Automation in BPA - Reality and Status Check

We’re not talking about futuristic, mechanical robots - but instead about intelligent software robots that automate virtually any business activity. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables organisations to create an intelligent software-based robotic digital workforce that lowers the costs associated with repetitive, manual intervention with business systems. Whilst for the last 2 years it has been extensively been pushed by vendors, now we are hearing the first feedback from initial implementations. There have been mixed reviews. Have benefits been over-promised? Are functionality gaps hindering real ROI success? This roundtable is looking at the state of the industry and the impact on other technology offerings.

What is the difference of RPA compared to BPM, their benefits, technologies? Where does it complement?

What are the proven use cases and which ones have not been successful?

What is the impact of RPA on other technologies and/or service providers?

How does RPA interact with existing business applications to complete a specific former human task?

How can enterprises, BPOs and shared services that rely on human labor to process work benefit from RPA technology? Can these benefits be measured?

Approaches to RPA tool architecture vary widely – what are the impacts? Which approaches seem to provide the positive examples in the market?

Today, over 67% of potential buyers of your products and services have already researched their decision and narrowed their vendor search before they contact a sales person. Social media platforms, marketing automation software and your prospect's "buyer journey" have radically changed how companies market and sell their products and services.

In this Roundtable session, we will explore the most relevant marketing trends in our industry and their impact on your company, including:

How has your prospect's buyer journey changed in the last 12 -18 months? What impact has this change made on your sales and marketing organisation?

Which marketing trends, tools and practices are you implementing and why?

Is your marketing content relevant for each stage of your buyer's journey: awareness, consideration and decision?

What challenges and opportunities do new marketing trends and tools present for your company?

R) Working in IM - a Veterans Club or Regaining Attractiveness? What’s the Impact?

Many people work in our ECM-IM industry already for over 10-20 years, belonging to the baby boomers or generation X and thus being digital immigrants. At the same time the IT skill gap is growing drastically because demographically there aren’t enough millennials interested in IT studies and the ones that graduate in IT prefer working either for disruptive cool start-ups of the cloud/internet economy or the larger well known ones (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Google,..), that attract them with lax work environments ranging from free snack or catered meals to pet sitting, daycare, work from home, educational programs and a very flat culture. This extensive”shortage of IT talent is already impacting on customer services, slowing speed to market and impeding innovation and new ideas. We therefore want to discuss the following topics:

What does this mean for our IM industry?

How can we attract new qualified young employees to our companies that bring that new spirit and help bridging the two worlds - if they are different?

Do Millennials have to adapt to the old regime or does company culture have to change?

Which examples have you implemented to attract and to retain the talent when competition is trying to move them away?

How do you close the often observed skill gap (e.g. literacy, numeracy, even problem solving using digital technology)?

What training & development opportunity do you offer or should you offer?

Do we need millennials to sell to millennials? What’s the effect on our sales approach, how is the buying behaviour changing?

On the other hand, how do you make your existing and aged employees fit for the future?

S) IM Channel Delivery 4.0- Where's the Added Value Going to Be?

Recent, disruptive forces in IT – including the Consumerization of IT, IoT, Mobility and Cloud technologies – have transformed “traditional” markets, shifted the nature of competition (and cooperation), disrupted purchasing models, consumer behaviour and the service landscape. Nowhere is this more evident than in the multi-tier distribution of customers, channel partners, distributors and vendors. We see many vendors that provide channel partners value differently by shifting channel allocations from technical training and enablement to front-end marketing and sales enablement. Likewise we see many new opportunities for channel partners, e.g. in vertical process specialisation or IoT related services and apps. In this round table we would like to discuss the following topics and questions:

What do you expect from distribution that can aggregate multivendor technologies at scale across both physical and virtual boundaries? Which tools, programs, services are needed to support IM vendors and their SI/VARs?

What do channel partners expect from their vendors in order to make money and to invest into their solutions platforms over a three year period?

What will be the Added Value of channel partners 4.0 in times of cloud, mobile and analytics? How can they sustain growth?

As the IoT enables tracking consumer behavior e.g. via mobile devices which can then suggest an individualised and customised solution and service, how can partners develop the skills necessary to become trusted advisors and suppliers for these customized solutions?

How can partners team up to offer combined, unique Managed Services, differentiated from the vendor’s offering? What is needed in doing so? What kind of skills and resources or support is needed?

How can partners and distributors position value? Will services become a commodity which is ‘built-in’ to the product that the customer is buying?

Portfolio for Services: How will offerings for solutions such as ‘Scanner/MFP as a Service’ or ‘Document Capture-as-a-Service’ evolve?

T) From Silo Busting to Silo Bridging in Multi-ECM Users

According to an AIIM survey of 2015 52% of ECM users have 3 or more ECM systems, 22% have more than 5. In addition 62% state they are still strongly depend on corporate file shares and virtual drives like Dropbox or Box. The two biggest challenges according this survey are user adaption and multiple repositories. Migration is a cumbersome effort, resistance against change is inherent of the human being. So, how do you sell a 4th or even 6th system to a an organization, that already struggles with its existing infrastructure? In this roundtable we will discuss the following topics:

What are the reasons for multiple information silos in organisations?

What are implications of this?

So, how can this situation be overcome?

What are the best strategies and practices you can share?

What are the limitations of today’s solutions to multiple information silos?